This is how it started. We were having a meeting about something completely different when I was unwise enough to challenge Malcolm Garrett, my co-director on the Dynamo London digital design community site when he said that the iPhone changes everything. He’s also been following rumours that Apple is apparently planning a tablet-style device. I said [...]
October 10, 2008
As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day – 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair. One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, [...]
February 1, 2008
So Microsoft has tendered a bid to buy Yahoo! for $44.6bn. I understand that Microsoft has to do something to build on its web strategy/presence. No-one uses Live Search, Live Spaces, or any of the rest. (OK. About one percent of people do). To build up any future trade for advertising, web services or development platforms, [...]
November 3, 2006
Not really Web 2.0 or web-anything, but interesting nonetheless. News on Wednesday that Microsoft is threatening to pull out of China because of human rights’ violations. The BBC quotes Fred Tipson, MS’ senior policy counsel, who says: “Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in [...]
July 9, 2006
I have been lucky enough to interview Paul Graham, partner at venture firm Y Combinator and author of Hackers and Painters, about Web 2.0 and some of the business issues it has provoked. Paul has an interesting take on who is going to be powerful in coming years: “A hacker with design sense is really [...]
July 8, 2006
Hopefully, the news report in Red Herring that Friendster has acquired a patent on social networking won’t mean that the article I’ve been writing on the subject won’t be out-of-date by the time it comes out. The patent, applied for in 2003 and awarded June 27th, applies to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting [...]
June 29, 2006
The signs of Web 2.0 are clear. Look for some aspect of community collaboration, of user-generated content, of the ability to customise the content, of a desktop-like application experience. But why exactly should we care? In the words of a BusinessWeek headline on June 5, 2006, why is that “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning� Users [...]
February 12, 2009